Wednesday, March 23, 2016

Today I listened to my state legislature reduce me to a second-class citizenship, subject to whatever discrimination the God-fearing choose to dish out

Courtesy of Charlotte Magazine:

Here’s what the North Carolina General Assembly did today, in your name, with your money: In the morning, introduced a bill that effectively defines “transgender” out of existence; forces transgender men to use women’s rooms and transgender women to use the men’s; allows private businesses to discriminate against gay and transgender people; prohibits local governments from preventing such discrimination; prohibits local governments from setting any employment standards, including minimum wage, for businesses they hire as contractors; jeopardizes $4.6 billion in federal Title IX funding for schools; nullifies every nondiscrimination ordinance ever passed by any local government in the state; allowed legislators five minutes to read the bill; allowed the public 30 minutes to comment on it; placed North Carolina on the regressive side of the state of Tennessee; claimed to be motivated by the need to establish consistent statewide standards for business operation in order to “improve intrastate commerce,” ignoring a brace of North Carolina companies that today publicly announced their opposition to the bill; and declared “that the general welfare of the State requires the enactment of this law under the police power of the State”; all predicated on their genuine or feigned horror over a presumed danger that has been shown, definitively, not to exist.